The night Parini has to share a bed with the weak-bladdered Borges culminates in Borges’s third visit to the toilet in the landlady’s bedroom where her husband had died “on the crapper” as had Borges’s own father, leading Borges to muse that perhaps he will die similarly. Jay Parini’s Borges and Me, a road novel, partly true, in which the youthful, earnest would-be poet Parini has foisted upon him the aged, blind writer of whose works Parini is unaware and made to drive him around Scotland in 1969. Isn’t it more the case that in every book we love we recognise our own rejected thoughts? Thoughts that felt too shameful, too obvious, too stupid, too painful, too strange to admit to ourselves, far less others? Written in the wake of the Prague spring, the saga of Hanta, a book compressor in an unnamed totalitarian country, is an exquisite tragicomedy, a meditation on the necessary futility of wisdom and futile necessity of love, that achieves more in its 98 pages than most writers do in a lifetime. What changed was not so much my writing as my reading – and that, in turn, transformed my writing.īohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude. He made me see all literature anew as a sort of guided dreaming – a joyful, comic, astonishing revelation. More a writer than a book: Jorge Luis Borges. The book that had the greatest influence on my writing
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